A Pirate's Curse

A very standard pirate room, nothing that really stood out to me. It’s on the smaller side, we were a little cramped at 6 so a smaller group would be better. This is definitely the kind of room where if you think you could have solved something, check every drawer as there is no indication that you were correct or anything unlocked. I do appreciate that it deviates from the standard Escapology ending of “input a code to exit” however.

This was a pretty terrible experience for my group. Firstly, one of the first puzzles was wrong and we wasted 10 minutes on it. After 3 asks for help only then revealed there was an issue that we could not have accounted for. After that several locks were hard to open. Even with the right combo the GM did not intervene on a lock opening issue. Finally the lighting was rather poor and in combination with worn out hints made some puzzles nearly impossible without decent guessing. So all of this with an at best distant GM made this a terrible experience with what seems like a decent room. At the end they did apologize about the experience and blamed the previous group for messing things up which is worrying that that is their best response. They eventually offered vouchers for a future date which is honestly the least they could do but this experience was already ruined so still left feeling bad. I would not recommend trying this room unless they do a major renovation.

This room was atrocious. Multiple puzzles were unplayable due to poor design, insufficient lighting and failure to distinguish between primary colors. Our guide was very unhelpful. There were also red herrings, which we do not enjoy. It was extremely frustrating to have figured out the puzzle but either not be able to get it to work because of finicky electronics or not solving it because everything in the room pointed towards my correct conclusion being incorrect.

They have some pretty good rooms… just need to change them out more often and maybe stay up to date with broken stuff cause there’s been times I’ve gone and stuff doesn’t open

One puzzle was color-based and it was impossible at times to differentiate. Another puzzle was already solved before we got to it and we took the components off their spots and replaced them and they still weren’t activating the mechanism they had to activate. We wasted a lot of time on this. Also, unfortunately, the GM wasn’t exactly attentive to us and our progress in the game. Just an example, after spending lots of time on the puzzle that wasn’t working we asked for some help and were told to just take off the components and put them back on until it worked (we had been doing that for 5+ minutes). There were a few other annoying things about the room & some others that weren’t too bad, but honestly, this was probably our worst experience at Escapology 😐

This room was fun and the staff was amazing as always! Overall the room was decorated well and the puzzles were great.

Ok so as we know, Escapology is a solid mainstream escape room chain. They are reliable, you can count on the puzzles to work, and the rooms are always linear. Which honestly - love that. They make escape rooms feel very accessible to your average person, aka us. This is the newest theme that has opened at this Garwood location, and honestly it was a solid room. I wouldn't say it was my favorite, or the best one, but if you're into pirates then this is a good choice. We did this as a group of 4, and had a fun time. I love a good crawl-through. Why was the intro video so long though.... we got the pirate's entire life story me thinks. Anyways, solid room and honestly would be fun for kids.